Thanks to a section of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows a court clerk to rubber stamp a subpoena, the Recording Industry Association of America is sending out hundreds of subpoenas to ISPs across America, who are forced to turn over the names of downloaders. Creative Loafing's Steve Fennessy talks to college students, industry watchers and music pirates about the recording industry's efforts to save itself by suing its customers.
In 2002, one-third of New Orleanians newly diagnosed with HIV were female, most of them African-American women. That number has been rising rapidly. Almost no one is talking about it. Gambit Weekly's Katy Reckdahl talks to two women who are willing to be open about their diagnosis. One has a red AIDS ribbon tattooed on her back. The other has outlived all the pallbearers she selected when she first got the news she was infected and thought she would die within months.
When the World Transhumanist Association met for a conference at Yale in June, they discussed the future rights of those who will be half-man, half-machine. The Village Voice's Erik Baard looks at uploading consciousness, bio-Luddites, and that nagging question: Who are we? "My gut says we'll never have the answer to that question," a Yale ethicist tells Baard.
Vivian Gornick told a "stunned" audience at a creative nonfiction seminar that she used "composite" characters for some of her pieces that ran in the Village Voice, reports Terry Greene Sterling. Gornick, who wrote for the Voice from 1969 to 1977, also admitted making up scenes and conversations in "Fierce Attachments," a memoir chronicling her relationship with her mother. Voice Editor Don Forst says Gornick "wouldn't do that under my editorship. If she did it once that would be the end of it."
Peter hardly seems your average crack- whore enthusiast. Tall, fresh-faced and clad in shorts, shades, athletic sandals and standard-issue rayon clubbing shirt, he looks like any other weekend warrior in search of big-city fun. White and in his early thirties, he holds a master's degree from a respectable local university and is working toward his Ph.D. while living at his grandparents' house. For the past five years or so, when Peter has gone looking for action, he often finds it in north St. Louis, at down- at-the-heels motels like the Grand, where he hires women to score crack and smoke it with him, then pays them to have sex with him at $10 a throw. Join Riverfront Times staff writer Mike Seely for a tour of St. Louis's most notorious no-tell motels.
Seventy thousand copies of Miami Herald's faux alternative were yanked off the streets and within 24 hours were replaced with a new version that deleted an unflattering satirical portrait of local developer Stuart Miller. The Herald's general counsel tells Miami New Times' Tristram Korten that the issue was "withdrawn for legal reasons," but Korten reports that it may have had more to do with management's sensitivity to Miller, whose family and powerful friends lashed out last year at the Herald in response to a column written by New Times alum Jim DeFede.
Nobody is denying that the papers and their corporate parent are still making money, but Howard Blume speculates that the recent layoff at the flagship paper in New York was designed to reassure investors that company management "can be trusted to look out for (their) interests." Blume asserts that VVM profits "have been held below investor expectations" due to a still shaky economy, rising health-care costs and issues associated with the company's controversial deal with New Times. Blume also reports that VVM reached a "tentative, compromise agreement" this week with the union at LA Weekly.
